In Mexico, on the Lam With Ken Kesey
I said I was doing nothing, but I’m actually trying to summon somebody: Ken Kesey, novelist, psychedelic prophet, leader of the Merry Pranksters, hero of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It was here, on this beach, that he took to the waves as I did, back in 1966. He was a hunted man then, on the run from the F.B.I. and Mexican federales, but even he, a man of great aplomb, found time for thoughtful bobbing.
“He’s working on his wave theory. This morning for breakfast he brewed and drank enough weed to put a horse in orbit. He’s been out there for three hours with his eyes closed ... imagining that he’s a piece of kelp or a jellyfish.”
The observer is Mountain Girl, one of several Merry Pranksters who followed Kesey to Manzanillo. She watches from the beach while pondering his oracular musings.
“It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”
The book's price was outrageous--$102.81 in 2008 dollars, more than twice the price of the title under review--but Whalen's publication by a house that during the '60s had also brought out work by T.S. Eliot and Eudora Welty was not. Whalen had always been associated with bestselling poets. He was one of the three poets who read work before Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco the night of October 7, 1955; he was mythologized by Jack Kerouac as "Warren Coughlin" in The Dharma Bums and as "Ben Fagan" in other novels; he was one of the earliest friends in poetry of Gary Snyder, the anarchist Buddhist nature poet. Until 1969 his own work had circulated much more in the usual manner for poetry than that of his famous contemporaries: broadsides, chapbooks and small-press editions. Between the scarcity and the word-of-mouth publicity, incredibly enough, there came to be loud public demand for a work based entirely on the sensation of coming and going. Here is the entirety of "Early Spring":
The dog writes on the window
with his nose
[ ... ]
As with the parallel poet cliques at Harvard (the so-called New York School's John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, and later Frank O'Hara) and Columbia (Ginsberg and Kerouac), the young writers at Reed lived to communicate their literary enthusiasms with one another. Welch and Whalen shared an affinity for Gertrude Stein's indifference to the distinction between sense and nonsense. All three exalted in William Carlos Williams's matter-of-fact ornery love of beauty. Williams returned the favor during a visit to Reed in 1950, reading over their work during a private audience and going so far as to remark on the meeting in his autobiography that they were "Good kids, all of them, doing solid work."
Snyder later provided Whalen with several entertaining examples to follow: first as a fire spotter for the US Forest Service, then years later as an expatriate student in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan. If style were really the man, Whalen could just as easily have followed his friend Welch's example and gone into advertising. According to Aram Saroyan's 1979 biography of Welch, Genesis Angels, Welch was the copywriter responsible for "Raid kills bugs dead," a memorable phrase that would fit happily in either poet's oeuvre. In practice, Whalen's predisposition to staying out of the 9-to-5 routine was much more adaptable to his interest in taking up Zen.
TFF offering wide range of movies
Also on the bill today is the short "Pull My Daisy" (1959) from Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It "celebrates and epitomizes the creative energies of the Beat Generation," according to festival notes. "Daisy," adapted by Jack Kerouac, includes Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel and Sally Gross.
Merrimack Valley, don your shades: Lowell is soon to be the location of a film shoot for a major motion picture with a star-studded cast, including Jennifer Garner.
The prospect has many locals, officials included, brimming with enthusiasm.
"Jennifer Garner coming into Lowell - that's a 10!" said Mayor Edward "Bud" Caulfield. "We're really excited about it. It will certainly put Lowell on the map."
[ ... ]
Birthplace of Bette Davis and Jack Kerouac, Lowell, of course, is no stranger to fame. The city has been shown in numerous short movies, documentary films, and TV dramas, and tomorrow, it is set to launch its first film festival.
Reformed white-trash brawler on the rise
When Jack Kerouac, then 45, passed through Chapel Hill, Banks hosted a party for the Beat writer at his home that lasted a week. "He was a hero for many of us, and here he was slightly mad and certainly physically ill, alcoholic and dying."
The Beats inspired him - not their writing, but their rebelliousness. "The 1950s was a very buttoned-up time in the US - sexually repressed, socially conformist, politically still under the cloud of McCarthyism. And here came these free-wheeling spirits, breaking down all those barriers."
Banks has written a screenplay of Kerouac's On the Road, for a film to be directed by Walter Salles (of The Motorcycle Diaries fame). He sees On the Road as a story of the loss of American innocence, rather than merely the defining novel of the Beat Generation. "It's set in 1948, which we often forget because it wasn't published until 1957. It's a postwar novel."
Emboldened by a Queens News profile on two unlandmarked Jack Kerouac homes, fans of the beat writer are planning a July get-together to discuss preserving his legacy.
Writer Patrick Fenton said he will take book dealer Marty Cummins and corporate bigwig Jeffrey Cole - who saved a Kerouac home in Orlando, Fla., from demolition - on a tour past Kerouac's Ozone Park apartment and South Richmond Hill house.
Neither was included in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's recent survey of 12,495 Queens structures, and the city never received requests to evaluate them, said commission spokeswoman Lisi de Bourbon.
March 5, 1958, Vol. III, No. 19
The Day Kerouac Almost, But Not Quite, Took Flatbush
By James Breslin“Man, how come I like your book, but I don’t like you?” This remark was made amid loud jeering while Jack Kerouac played “meet the author” last Tuesday evening for Brooklyn college students.
Every campus Bohemian, Hobohemian, and Subterranean had donned crew-neck sweater, taken pen and notebook in hand, and marched right down to that lecture to find out just what this crazy Kerouac and his beat generation are all about, anyway.
Jack, however, who had left Columbia “because I quite the football team and had to start paying tuition,” declined to make any pronouncements for the academy.
“What’s the beat generation’s outlook on life?”
“It’s an illusion.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s an illusion, not real—man, you ought to know, you go to college!”
Performance ensemble Aurea honors composer David Amram with a series of events beginning Tuesday
A pioneer on the jazz French horn, Amram was the first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. He also wrote music for New York’s first-ever jazz poetry readings with author Jack Kerouac in the 1950s, and is known for his film scores for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate.
Now the 77-year-old Amram is being honored with a week-long series of performances, lectures and film screenings at Brown University. The event, dubbed “David Amram: Celebrating a Half-Century of Multicultural Artistic Collaborations,” is being sponsored by Brown and the Rhode Island Philharmonic.
The divine sounds of Mr Elling
Elling discovered the beat-generation poets in his adult years, after hearing Mark Murphy quote them in his vocalese and later worked on a project about their legacy. He sees in their work a confluence of jazz and poetry. Jazz is the music of improvisation and improvisation is "a compositional thinking sped way up". It carries the same rules, the only difference is "it is happening in real time, in front of people and it takes a very cultured and trained mind in order to do it very well".
Similarly, Kerouac was trying "to compose coherent free-form poetry but to do it in such a way that it carried real content but to do it as jazz people did, in the moment".
Kerouac would "practise" writing for days to prepare himself to be "in the moment" so that when he sat down to finally write, he would have an open mind to the ideas passing through him. "That's a jazz way of writing," Elling says.
The beat poets also ushered in an awareness and acceptance of Buddhist consciousness to 20th-century America, he says, coining what he calls "a 20th-century language of youth" and their social concerns were precursors to the radical ideas of the 1960s.
On Monday, April 7 the Liverpool Culture Company will launch its most ambitious educational project yet - The Orrery.
Inspired by traditional astronomical instruments which show how planets orbit the sun in the solar system, The Orrery has been created to reflect Liverpool's position at 'the Centre of the Creative Universe', a reference to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's comments following a visit to the city in the 1960s.
Ginsberg a muse for Docolomansky
Students gave Slovak theater director Viliam Docolomansky confused looks when he asked if poet Allen Ginsberg had lectured at Yale.
“The beginning of my work in the theatre was influenced by Allen Ginsberg,” he explained.
“That is why I asked, with the great hope that Allen Ginsberg gave lectures at this university,” he continued, to scattered chuckles when his planned introduction failed to deliver the intended effect.
About twenty people gathered Wednesday in Trumbull College as Docolomansky discussed his philosophies on the nature and purpose of theater. Docolomansky, founder of Farm in the Cave, an award-winning international theatre studio, also spoke at length about his formative experiences as a director at the tea, co-sponsored by the Yale Repertory Theatre and the World Performance Project.
A teenager in Eastern Europe during the fall of Communism, Docolomansky described his first encounter with Ginsberg’s poetry, and later the poet himself, as “an unbelievable experience.” But it was another poet that led to Docolomansky’s ultimate decision to focus on directing instead of music composition, his other passion. After traveling to Andalucía in Spain to study the life of the early 20th-century Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Docolomansky and several colleagues collaborated on a theater production originally slated to be performed in three months. The production time ultimately stretched eight months, draining away his savings. But Docolomansky was nevertheless pleased with the outcome.
“I could not go back to performing Shakespeare in three or four weeks,” he said.
Buck 65 pokes fun at modern culture through rap
When an artist begins one of the songs from his latest album with a killer new version of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, you know it's probably a record you want to give a listen.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed/Devoid of conviction, conflicted, annoyed," begins one of the songs from Buck 65's latest album, Situation. The song, 1957, is haunting, a catchy beat meshed with brooding lyrics. The whole album is like a present just waiting to be unwrapped, running the gamut from the evocative 1957 to the danceable, frenetic Dang.
But it's the lyrics that really make this album memorable. Buck 65, a poet in his own right, is also a literary enthusiast.
[ ... ]
From his pop-culture lyrics (think Marilyn Monroe marries Arthur Miller) to his pinpoint literary allusions, his songs are like verbal dessert, filled with layers of delicious wordplay and beautiful, frank imagery. "With this record I was thinking a lot about what I see as a major cultural shift that took place 50 years ago," he says. "I think our youth and celebrity-obsessed and depraved culture we live in now has its roots in the late '50s." In fact, 1957 was a hugely iconic year for Buck 65, whose real name is Ricardo Terfry. Not because he was there; but on his Myspace, he rhymes the reasons it was such a monumental year for pop culture, music, and the political atmosphere of North America.
"1957 was the year of the Frisbee, Tang, and the pink flamingo... of Jailhouse Rock...the year Bettie Page vanished...the year the Beat Generation was born...the year of ongoing obscenity trials in the U.S. congress... the year Pandora's Box opened: sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and youth rebellion. 1957 was the beginning of the end," he says.
And when he's not thinking of writing (he's already making big plans, including writing and mixing beats, for his next two albums), he's doing the online equivalent of scribbling in his diary: his blog is updated regularly on www.buck65.com.
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